0.1 Sustainability: the elephant in the room  (Page 5/12)

Because scholars now live—and will henceforth live—in a kind of half-world between print and digital technologies, this early period of transition has brought the confusion and uncertainty we see everywhere. We want to minimize these transitional problems. Even more, we want mechanisms that stabilize the cultural record, both print and digital, and that sustain and perhaps improve how we investigate that record and communicate what we learn. In short, we have two closely related problems on our hands: how to carry on our research in mixed depositories; and how to communicate and exchange our work.

Here’s a small example—a personal experience—that may help to expose the issues.

For several years I’ve been spending four weeks in Berkeley in December and January, between my fall and spring terms at the University of Virginia. I have a research appointment at UC Berkeley and thus get access to the U.C. libraries. I haunt the Bancroft and the Doe. But California’s recent economic catastrophe forced drastic cutbacks in the Berkeley library hours. I arrived in Berkeley this past December and found the libraries were all closed.

The situation threw into relief what this particular scholar sorely wanted: direct access to the printed books and journals in Berkeley’s regular and special collections. Although I had privileged access to all the digital resources of two major research libraries—U.C. Berkeley and U. of Virginia—my research projects couldn’t proceed. I had to consult certain materials in Special Collections. That was one problem, though it wasn’t the most imperative. I also needed access to a large corpus of scholarly work that is only available in print. Indeed, it was this work—scholarship developed and published for the most part during the past forty years—which established my own research frame of reference. But the fact is that very little of the scholarship still in copyright is digitally accessible, so unless you can get the books and journals themselves, you’re out of luck.

This little episode—trivial enough in its way—exposes two difficult issues for scholars. The first is well known but may be usefully rehearsed and explored a bit further. The second, less well recognized, has grown within the digital humanities community itself.

University presses control the vast majority of the copyrights of scholarly books. After a few years, nearly all of these books have exhausted their salability, and in recent years that timeframe—along with the sales numbers—has continued to shrink. Still older books—works, for instance, published before the drastic pricing changes that university presses began to introduce in the late eighties—are virtually entombed. Scholars’ need for these works remains as fundamental as ever. But presses resist efforts to release these works to a free culture network. In fact, few are even minimally “revenue producing”—indeed, they can be serious drains on a press’s finances.

The issues are highlighted in Google’s negotiations with the Authors Guild and the American Association of Publishers to establish guidelines and rights for Google’s book digitization plans. These negotiations are taking place without any effective input from the scholarly community. Neither the Modern Language Association nor any of the large professional organizations with a fundamental interest in humanities education and cultural heritage have been participants in the settlement negotiations. But whereas the chief interest of the Guild and the AAP (and Google) is in secure profits, scholars want to sustain a vigorous intramural communication, on one hand, and to maximize the public access to knowledge on the other. The interests of the educational and scholarly communities might have been defended by university presses and their association (AAUP). But this has not happened—on the contrary in fact—because academic presses have been running for years on a for-profit model that is little different from commercial publishers. Attempts to address this problem have only just begun as libraries and universities explore new procedures for making educational materials accessible online, either freely or at reasonable costs.